Chapter 9 Hades in Hellenistic Philosophy (The Early Academy and Stoicism)

Adrian Mihai

A chapter on the various ancient philosophical conceptions of Hades in a collection dedicated to narratives of visitors to the Underworld (who actu- ally came back) might seem unsuitable at first sight. And that, for two rea- sons: first, ancient philosophers were more interested in such questions as “What is Hades and where, cosmologically, is it situated?” or “What part of the soul goes there?” and “Does Hades as a place of souls really exists?,” which raise questions about the nature of the soul. These questions were different from the interests of the poets (Vergil, for example), who were working with a tra- ditional pattern (the journey of a hero to the Underworld and his return). We do not find such treatment in the philosophers, at least not in the Platonists and the Stoics. Second, for philosophers such as Plato, Zeno of Citium and Epicurus, the soul, after the death of the body, cannot return to earth. However, the philosophical perspective of Hades is important in this kind of volume, only if to show the difference or gap between such speculations and the ones of the poets. It is understandable then that the present contribution does not focus exactly on the visitors who return from the Underworld after a short visit there, since philosophers were not interested in such particular questions, but wanted to know the general nature of souls and their abode after the death of the body. Whether or not the dispute that divides modern scholars regarding the importance of beliefs in the afterlife for Greek thought will ever be settled makes little difference to the subject at hand,1 since the ancient philosophi- cal writings bristle with remarks and analyses about the post-​mortem destiny of the soul. The present study proposes to outline and to sketch the doctrine of Hades as an abode of the dead in various Hellenistic philosophers, mainly pertaining to the Old Academy and to the Early and Middle Stoic school. The choice of these two main schools in a study about the afterlife in antiquity

1 Many of the most renowned scholars on Greek religion still believe in a quasi-agnosticism​ of the Greeks concerning the fate of the soul in the afterlife. See, for example, Veyne 1983, Rudhardt 1992, 7, Grabbe 2000, 163–​85 and Richard 2003, 43.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | DOI:10.1163/9789004375963_​ 010​ Hades in Hellenistic Philosophy 195 should be an obvious one, since there is little in the Epicureans and the Peripatetics. The first denied any afterlife, since the soul consisted of subtle particles that dissolve at death. As for the latter, the lack of information is due mainly to the scarcity of our sources, yet we know the interest in the school about the nature and the function of the soul. Any study of the afterlife in ancient thought must take into consideration a fundamental terminological distinction. In antiquity, at least from the Hellenistic period onwards, there were at least three locations where the souls of the dead could go: under the earth, in the sky or back on earth (since the soul can pass through various incarnations). These locations contained at least three realms of the afterlife: the Isles of the Blessed, Hades and Tartaros. Regarding the last two, and during the period that concerns us here, Hades was a kind of Purgatory, while Tartaros was what we might call Hell. In conse- quence, whenever we talk about Hades, we mean a place that has the following characteristics: (1) it is a place of transit, (2) situated either under the earth (as in Plato) or in the heavens (as in Herakleides or Xenokrates), (3) where the souls endure purifying expiations (4) for an unspecified period of time after which, if completely purified, the soul will continue its journey towards the Heavens. In contrast, Tartaros, like Hell, is a place of eternal punishment from where no soul can escape.2 Forasmuch as, then, the location of Hades in the heavens (see below) cor- responds to or is based on both the ontological and cosmological function of the stars (the planets and the fixed stars), a word on their nature and the cos- mological system is necessary here. According to the ancient conceptions, the stars were incorruptible bodies, hollow spheres, transparent, encircling the earth and animated by a uniform circular movement. The solar system of Late Antiquity was composed of seven planets (the moon was also considered to be a planet) revolving around the earth, which was situated at the center of the cosmos. Further, for the period that concerns us here, the authors under discussion follow the ‘Egyptian’ or ‘Platonic’ order of the planets, which is as follows: Earth, Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus (or Venus, Mercury), Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This order is fundamental for a good understanding of the localiza- tion of Hades as an abode of the souls. Having thus delineated the contours of our study, I shall first look briefly at the Homeric Hades, which embodied, for ancient philosophers, the tradi- tional view about the destiny of the soul after the death of the body. Then,

2 For a more complete account on the various representations of Hades in Antiquity, from the 5th c. bce to the 6th c. ce, see Mihai 2015.